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updated 10:20 AM UTC, Dec 13, 2023

Restructuring Nigeria Without A Moral Revival Will Fail: Martin Onovo

Unic Press UK: Martin Onovo, the 2015 presidential candidate of the National Conscience Party (NCP), said that restructuring Nigeria at this time is bound to fail, save there is a moral revival in the country. He averred that the current clamoring for restructuring of the country is oiled/driven by the divisive dictatorship of the ruling party, All Progressive Congress.

Speaking during an interview with Ejikeme Omenazu, the senior political correspondent for the Independent Newspapers Limited, Onovo further addressed the nation on a range of economic and political issues.

NIGERIA ECONOMY

Engineer Onovo denounced the government statement that the country was out of economic recession. When asked by Omenazu to respond to the reports from the national authorities that the Nigerian economy was no longer in a recession, the consulting engineer said:

“An economic recession is a decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) estimates in two consecutive quarters. An economic depression is a continued decline in GDP well beyond a recession. An economic stagflation is a stagnant GDP that is complicated by high unemployment and high inflation. Using these correct universal definitions to interpret the economic figures published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), it is simple and clear that the Nigerian economy went into a stagflation at the end of June 2016 when the decline in GDP in two consecutive quarters was complicated by the high unemployment and high inflation. With the inconsequential (0.5%) change in the GDP in June 2017, complicated by the high unemployment rate and high inflation rate, it is clear that we still remain in an economic stagflation. The claim that we exited economic recession is very incompetent and misleading.” 

IPOB

During the interview, the proscription of and designation of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) as a terrorist organization by the Nigerian government as ruled by a court, came to the fore. Onovo reiterated his position as previously aired that all must wait for judicial finality on the IPOB issue as the lawyer of IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu had filed a suit in a court of law challenging the judgement. He said that the National Conscience Party (NCP) strongly upholds the ‘Rule of Law’. Even when we presume like several eminent legal practitioners that a court of law was misled when IPOB was declared a terrorist organization, we have to uphold the ‘Rule of Law’.

Biafra agitators “must subject themselves to all Nigerian laws. They must realize that all men are created free and so respect the rights of others, particularly those that disagree with their agitations. We advise Biafra agitators to consider the later position of the late General Odimegwu Ojukwu, that the new Biafra is not territorial, but intellectual,” says Onovo.

2019 AND THE COALITION FORMED BY SEVERAL POLITICAL PARTIES

The Coalition for New Nigerian (CNN) has a very good leadership and it has excellent plans; the coalition is necessary for good governance in the light of the catastrophe [‘perverting public morality, subverting national security, undermining national unity, destroying democracy and ruining the economy’] bequeathed by the previous ruling party PDP and its twin brother APC; all the collaborating political parties under CNN umbrella are optimistic of success; so the primary strategy of the coalition should be to frustrate all attempts to rig the elections in 2019 as several apparatchiks of the APC and PDP have confessed to rigging elections, Onovo said.

OPERATION PYTHON DANCE

“There is no justification for ‘Operation Python Dance’. It is wasteful, deceitful, dictatorial, divisive and genocidal. Nigeria has our Nigeria Security and Civil Defense Corps, our regular Police force and our Police Mobile Force for the normal maintenance of law and order. The military is only used for internal security when these Police organisations are overwhelmed. Otherwise, the military must focus on its primary role of the maintenance of our territorial integrity and defending our country from external aggression. There must be no such unjustifiable operation in the South South or South West or anywhere else in Nigeria. The ‘Operation Python Dance’ must be discontinued immediately,” Onovo told the Independent Newspapers, Nigeria.

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